The Omega Directive

DVD, Star Trek: Voyager S4 (The Omega Directive)

Oh look, it's another Seven of Nine episode, what a surprise! The ex-Borg drone really did take over the series, but this season you still get episodes for the other cast members on a relatively balanced scale, and they also remain part of the story - take Chakotay, for example. This isn't an episode about him or where he greatly features, but it's far from the later seasons' usage which seemed to mainly be him sitting on the Bridge with nothing much to say. Like the previous episode he gets to be the First Officer, gallantly carrying out his Captain's orders despite the classified nature of the mission keeping him out of the loop, something which he's successful about changing Janeway's mind on (not something that occurred very often, it has to be said!), to allow the senior staff into her lonely sphere. Kim and Tuvok are also very much present in the story: though it doesn't quite extend to being a B-plot, Harry's speculation on the nature of the mystery and then his dissatisfaction over Seven's draconian command style lead him into conversation with the Vulcan. The one who doesn't show her face much, and like the previous episode you'd expect the Chief Engineer to be at the heart of this mission, is B'Elanna Torres. This was at the time when Roxann Dawson was at her most pregnant and couldn't do much, the only explanation for why her character wasn't the lead as it seems like a very B'Elanna story. I wonder if originally it had been written as a vehicle for her and was modified to suit Seven when Dawson was less available?

The Engineer would ordinarily be the one coming up with the technological solution and perhaps the Omega particle was something the Klingons had learned to revere for its great power. It does ring truer for Seven, and it may well be that it never was meant as a B'Elanna story at all, but you can see she is now taking roles and stories that should have been for others' expertise. Kim even says in the episode that she's probably the most intelligent human alive, so why does she need the rest of them? She's taken a lot of the Captain's attention this season, now she's taking a mission that the Engineer should be doing and even shows her command skills that might be said to take away from the other authority characters like Chakotay and Tuvok, not to mention the Doctor's discovery of being a real boy as he passes on his knowledge to her on a regular basis. Paris should have been watching his back that she didn't start piloting the ship, and Neelix if she was becoming interested in cookery! But despite all that it is another episode that explores a different aspect of Seven's growing maturity, and Borg culture if that isn't an oxymoron: the Omega particle is considered the highest form of perfection by them and Seven is drawn to it as a result. The most essential moment is when she acquiesces to Janeway's orders instead of doing what she wants, what she feels she needs to do, which is to harness the power of this particle instead of destroying it, acknowledging Janeway's assertion that if it went wrong it would take out half the Quadrant.

When you consider the extremes of behaviour she's exhibited, both in trying to conform to her new home and the stern confines of the Captain, and doing her own thing in direct contravention to her rules and protocols, standing down and not proceeding as she wished was a great leap forward for her. It was something necessary for the character because if she'd pushed things once again she would surely have put things backward a long way and Janeway would have had no choice but to confine her again, and who knows how long it would take for trust to be reestablished? This time she actually goes through the correct channels, requesting Chakotay to allow her to proceed with her plan to save Omega rather than destroy it. He won't sanction it, but agrees to take the request to the Captain, and although Seven doesn't get what she wanted in the end, which may suggest to her it would be better to have gone her own way, she's also done that before and knows that will have consequences and she won't be able to live in this miniature society if she doesn't follow the command hierarchy. She's learning. I wonder if Chakotay's becoming a soft touch as this is the second crewmember in a row who's persuaded him - in 'Vis à Vis' Tom creates a convincing argument why he should be allowed to work on Steth's ship, and likewise, Seven's plan impresses Chakotay enough for him to put in a word with the Captain! It shows him being a good First Officer again. Add to that the signs of his close friendship with Janeway when he calls her his closest friend and is able to talk her out of the strict protocols of the Omega directive, and it's a good one for him - he gets the crew doing their jobs when they don't know what it's all about, but also speaks up for them to the Captain which is exactly what a good Number One does and what we didn't see enough of later.

It's very rare for a mission to be so highly classified that it's for the Captain's eyes only and she can't discuss it with the crew, which creates a mystery that is genuinely mysterious, so far from the kind of writing designed to pull you along from episode to episode in the serialised 'Discovery.' Here we're getting a sense of the lower decks working away, and it's much more believably written than that series: firstly, in Kim and Tuvok's modifying of a torpedo (again, why wasn't Torres in charge of this?), and again when Seven is given her own team and has them work in her own coldly efficient style, even down to Borg designations! There should have bee pushback from the crew on this, like when Data was given command and encountered prejudice, only Kim exhibiting distaste. Harry's excitement at the possibilities of this secret mission show something that hasn't been common on the series this season, but used to come up here and there: the belief they might be close to finding a way home. Harry jumps to the conclusion that Janeway's found a way to create a wormhole and she can't tell the crew because she doesn't want to get their hopes up (so Tuvok logically advises him not to do so!). It's most likely the thoughts of home have been magnified by the recent contact with Starfleet that enabled them to announce their survival to their families and Starfleet, so this is an organic way to show that rekindled hope and was ideally presented by the generally optimistic, if green, Ensign Kim without being an irritating chatterbox like Cadet (now Ensign), Sylvia Tilly on 'DSC'!

Janeway's position is once again shown to be unique as ordinarily a Captain would have the option to report back to Starfleet Command about Omega, but she doesn't have that, as Chakotay says. He bravely suggests she isn't always a reasonable woman, something it's almost insubordinate to say to your Captain, but it's true, she isn't always stable and correct, and her deep friendship with Chakotay has been a stabilising influence on more than one occasion. This time she sees he's right and even says to her senior staff in the briefing that Starfleet didn't have their predicament in mind when they drafted the directive. I'm not sure that's entirely true, because although Voyager is the furthest ship out there, the nature of starship missions is that they tend to be out on the final frontier beyond all backup and without easy recourse to their superiors and that's why Starfleet Captains have to be the best. At first, Janeway does have backup in the form of Seven of Nine, whose Borg knowledge means she is as informed as Starfleet Captains that had been assimilated, but that isn't enough - it makes you wonder if Seven knows about things like Section 31. Omega would seem to be both one of the greatest threats to the Federation that 31 would want to eliminate, but also the greatest potential asset and you can bet they know all about it! It would be fascinating to see this directive carried out in the Alpha Quadrant to see if 31 swooped in and got involved…

Opening the strict rules of the directive up to bending because she has no alternative but to admit the truth to Seven, probably made it easier for Janeway to break it open entirely and share with her most trusted crewmen (though again, B'Elanna absence at the briefing is most strange), and the details make for a fascinating tale, all about some 23rd Century scientist, Ketteract, over a hundred years ago (why couldn't they have worked that into 'DSC' instead of making up something entirely new and disconnected like the spore drive?). The Omega particle is capable of incredible forms of power and energy, but it was also incredibly dangerous - we get to see the research centre from that period that looks very much like the Starbases in the 'TOS' films (and 'DS9'), and we hear that the area in which the experiment went wrong has been affected ever since. It's thought by most people that a stable warp field being impossible to create there is a naturally occurring phenomenon, but it was the result of the experiment and the reason Starfleet takes such extreme measures against Omega: if it happened on a larger scale it would mean warp travel in the galaxy would be impossible, effectively returning space travel to the early years of slow, multi-year journeys. It's as big a revelation as in the 'TNG' episode 'Force of Nature' when it was discovered that warp was having a deleterious effect on space and a warp limit was imposed (subsequently superceded by ships like Voyager and the Enterprise-E whose nacelles were slanted as that seemingly was part of the solution, though I'm not sure it's actually canon, more best guess speculation to a shortsighted writing problem).

We're used to the 'DSC' writers throwing in as many Trek references as possible, but in the old days of 'Voyager' it was far less common as they concentrated on creating good stories more than linking to old ones! But it was wonderful when Janeway's talking about understanding how Einstein must have felt on the eve of the atomic bomb, or Dr. Marcus with the Genesis device, both of whom have appeared in Trek - Einstein was only a holographic recreation, but Marcus was the scientist responsible for the terraforming device turned super-weapon Khan wanted to use to kill Kirk, as well as a much more ignominious appearance in Trek's worst film to date, 'Star Trek Into Darkness.' There's the same level of concern over this as there was around the Genesis device, with Janeway warning that the ship will have less than ten seconds to warp out of there if anything goes wrong, and of course, thanks to the aliens (who never got a name), it was necessary. I didn't quite understand what was happening because we see them kick out something behind them, then zip into warp to escape, but the colourful field left behind didn't destroy the alien ships. I think this escape was separate from the threatened event Janeway was talking about, but the episode doesn't reach the heights it could have. I wanted something akin to the amazing moment in 'Generations' (the best Trek film), when the Enterprise warps out of harm's way as the shockwave takes out that system.

The Prime Directive is mentioned, but I'm not sure it would really apply in this case since these are space-faring aliens, probably even warp capable, though that wasn't entirely made clear. Janeway states that it is rescinded for the duration of the mission, showing how gravely Omega is viewed. It's surprising more races hadn't discovered it and tried to synthesise it as it could be viewed as a parallel to the arms race on Earth with every small country wanting its own nuclear weapons to ensure its seat at the high table of global negotiations. Analogies didn't really work, which is one reason this episode is successful enough to be enjoyable, but feels as if it wasn't pushed to its possible limits. It takes another direction when encountering Omega was for Seven a profound and personal experience, leaving the episode on the note of at least some kind of acknowledgment towards the spiritual, something highly rare in Trek - Janeway finds Seven in the Da Vinci holoprogram (she says she deactivated the master, which was a shame as it would have been good to get his wisdom on her impressions, but either way it was lovely to visit that place again), amid all these religious iconography, contemplating the meaning of it all. She says that previously she'd considered mythologies used to explain moments of 'clarity' as she puts it, to be dismissed as trivial and concedes that she may have been wrong. It's very vague and universal, but sometimes you think even if Trek recognises something beyond, it's at least on the right track, as opposed to the militant scientism atheist viewers would prefer, which doesn't reflect the majority of the population of the world's views.

Doing this with the most hardline scientific characters is also refreshing and brings to mind the discussion the command staff had on 'DS9' one time about faith, with Worf and Kira coming down on one side while O'Brien was on the other. I wouldn't want them to be going into this stuff regularly, especially as Trek isn't about that, but it's good to see faith and belief recognised in the franchise, far from the apparent desire of Roddenberry to flatten all such things in the future, which I'm not certain he really wanted to do, but is often stated as fact by people with that agenda. There isn't much going on between Seven and Chakotay, and when you consider they ended up together it's even more apparent that there was nothing there, but this time Seven at least finds something to connect with, calling him a spiritual man and a number of times he's been the refuge for those on the ship that aren't satisfied by the physical explanations they're supposed to be, and need something more. The stakes are more than Seven's peace of mind, as evidenced by the alien's horror that they've come to disrupt and destroy the life's work that he believes his people's future depends upon. What he doesn't realise is the risks his people are running and Janeway won't gamble with half the Quadrant to satisfy curiosity, saying the final frontier has some boundaries that shouldn't be crossed and that fear is sometimes to be respected - that's a good lesson for scientists who sometimes come across as needing to explore something no matter the consequence because it must be learned: a quest for knowledge at all costs is morally repugnant.

As I said, the themes of the episode, whether the parallels for experimentation at any cost, the analogy with nuclear power (also explored well in 'the episode' as I always used to call it, Season 1's 'Time and Again'), or the difference between theory and belief, with Omega postulated to have been used at the creation of the universe (again, notice they say creation, as if there were a Creator, more than an impersonal force of coming into being), were none of them taken far enough for my liking. It's just about enough that this is a great mystery with the Captain acting alone to begin with and the crew required to blindly follow orders, only the mysterious Omega sign a clue. It was great to see Seven unshackled and given much leeway for her work due to the extreme importance of it, the fate of the Quadrant potentially hanging on what she did, and she responds by backing down for once to allow Janeway to do what is necessary. There are even minor delights such as Tuvok and Kim playing Kal-toh, the mention of Marcus and even Ensign Wildman (though we sadly don't see her, though the Wildman name was to take on new meaning next season), and the Science Lab once again used, this time for the torpedo modification. Jeff Austin who played the alien had also been in 'DS9' as a Bolian ('The Adversary'). The Doctor, Paris, Neelix and especially Torres are very much underused, but because Kim, Tuvok and Chakotay support the story so well it doesn't take anything away and I like the mix of characters in this season. It's true that Seven was given much more than her share, but the others weren't being written out yet, so it feels like a fairer balance than later.

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